Eating is (to nurses) low priority for older people in hospital

Not only in Britain. This is the results section from the abstract of a newly published article about a study of nurses and nutrition in an Italian hospital:

Although nurses perceived malnutrition as a significant issue, it was often considered of secondary importance compared with other aspects of care. Food choice, although available, is often limited to very few options, diets are standardised and monotonous and patients must choose ‘sight unseen’. Time constraints and understaffing were the obstacles for the identification of the need for nutritional care. Organisational and managerial decision-making did not ensure the provision of high-quality nutritional care. Patients’ nutritional status was often not assessed, and tools such as the Mini Nutritional Assessment were not mentioned by the participants.

One thing about this is the way in which the basic aspects of daily living seem less important to the professionals in a hospital than in normal life: washing, eating and drinking.

But also the relationship aspects: eating is a social matter, it should be done with people you enjoy being with: it's not just a filling station for nutrition.

I'm also doubtful about the argument that you hear sometimes that this arises because nurses are over-educated nowadays, so they're concentrating on the things they're trained to do, rather than on some idea of basic caring that education takes away from you. No, I think it's about discipline and self-discipline. When I was first in hospital in the 1970s, the whole place was regimented by a terrifying ward sister. But the regimentation meant that the basic caring as well as the training and treatment activities went on in a well-ordered routine. When I've been in hospital recently, it's all more relaxed in style, but that also means that people hang around yattering in scruffy clothes, thinking about their own affairs rather than running the place well.

The link to the article in the Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences